


can't say yes (don't wanna say no)

by trashwriter



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Ambiguous Future Fic, Cuddling & Snuggling, Dubious Morality, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Facing Fears, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Mentions of attempted rape, Misunderstandings, Secrets, basically carl tells all, michonne is a good bro, something of a character study, three-shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-23 11:29:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6115120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trashwriter/pseuds/trashwriter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His brain seems to be stuck on a loop.</p><p>Ron, his Ron, wants to marry him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The notepaper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Carl makes an accidental discovery.

Carl doesn’t think too much of shrugging into Ron’s favourite hoodie. He needs to be covered when he goes downstairs because most everyone is ‘in house’ right now and Ron’s hoodie, and a pair of clean boxers from the laundry he still hasn’t put away, are the closest things to hand. The fact that the hoodie is warm and worn and smells like Ron is just a bonus.

He pads downstairs, laments the fact that soon it’ll be cold enough that he’ll need to put on pants just to wander the house as the chill starts to seep up through the floorboards, and bustles around the kitchen making hot chocolate and slicing a big chunk of Carol’s homemade banana nut bread because he doesn’t really feel like cooking. Or doing much of anything except sliding back into bed with Ron.

He’s waiting for the kettle to boil, snagging a few of the sweet strawberries out of the fruit bowl they’ve finally been able to make use of for something other than collecting dust and reminding them that they need to find better sheeting for the greenhouses if they ever want to see a piece of fruit that didn’t come out of a can ever again. Carol’s been talking about homemade jam, and if they’ve got homemade jam to go with their homemade butter and homemade bread Carl thinks he might not eat anything else ever again. Unless someone finds pudding mix, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

He can’t help but grin to himself, life has been strangely good, really good, for the past few months. He can’t remember ever being this happy, not even in the fuzzy slightly surreal memories of the time _before_. He knows that part of that is because of Ron, who is…well, Carl doesn’t really know what he is, he’s his lover of course but also his run-partner, his roommate, his rival, and just _his_ , by virtue of being a part of his strange patchwork post-apocalyptic family unit, sure, but it’s somehow more than that.

Carl thinks that this is probably how people know when they’re in love with other people.

He fights down the giddy noise bubbling up in his chest, and instead buries himself deeper into the too large hoodie and shoves his hands deep into the pockets.

In the pocket on the right hand side there’s a balled up bit of paper. Curious, Carl pulls it out and begins the process of unwadding it. If it’s a request list for their next run he’s pretty sure Ron’s forgotten all about it at this point ‘cause he hadn’t mentioned anything about it. And if it’s a set of special requests, well, Carl never claimed not to be unreasonably nosy and it’s not like Ron’s gonna be able to hide anything from him on the road anyway.

When the paper is finally unrolled and smoothed flat though, it’s clear that it’s not a list. Well, not list of supplies anyway.

It’s a sheet of graphing paper torn from Ron’s notebook and the title at the top reads: **_“ASK CARL TO MARRY YOU!!!”_**

It’s scratched deep in pencil and underlined three times. The list is a little more vague, reading: _where? When? HOW, what even is romance?? And ring??????_

Punctuated here and there by cartoon-y sketches of his hat, an engagement ring that he’d never wear not even if it came from Ron, and a wiggly line that might have been the start of a tree or the slope of his bare shoulder, it was difficult to say.

Carl, doesn’t know what to do. Completely floored by the little piece of paper in front of him.

They haven’t talked about marriage, mostly because they’re basically the apocalypse version of married anyway, living together, working together and sleeping together. Marriage is for people like Glenn and Maggie who like the formality and the ceremony of the thing and he and Ron just…aren’t that.

Are they?

Carl doesn’t think that they are, necessarily, but he also hadn’t thought that the man sleeping in his bed would ever ask him to marry him. So maybe he doesn’t know Ron as well as he thought. Which also highlights the fact that, despite three years of almost constant proximity, Ron doesn’t know everything about Carl. Mostly because Carl hasn’t told him.

The kettle whistling at him in angry insistence that it’s done boiling is a welcome interruption. He pours a bit into each cup and stirs before adding a few drops of the coffee cream Michonne likes to dump in her morning chai.

His brain seems to be stuck on a loop.

Ron, his Ron, wants to _marry_ him. 

What the hell is he supposed to do with that?

The sliding door bangs in its frame as Judy thunders in from outside, her blonde-brown hair a tangled wind-combed mess.

“Carl!” she squeals bouncing up into a hug that takes the breath out of him for a second, the kid is damn strong for a seven year old.

“Hey Jude,” he grunts, “Did you grow again? I swear you’re bigger than you were at breakfast.”

“You can measure me after dinner!” she says, bouncing out of his hold and snitching a cube of the banana bread without shame.

Carl moves quickly to grab the damning bit of notepaper crinkling it back up nice and tight and shoving it back into it’s pocket home in the same hasty slightly guilty movement that must have got it stuck there in the first place.

“Uncle Morgan is gonna teach me a new kata today, you wanna come help me practice?”

Five minutes ago Carl would have waved her away with the excuse of needing a nap and slipped back into bed with Ron, possibly for the nap in question and possibly for more canoodling and another round of lazy sex.

Now, well, now he's vibrating out of his skin, his mind is spinning and sitting still isn’t anywhere in his near future. Let alone facing Ron without giving away that he now knows what the other boy has been thinking about. And beyond all that, he isn’t sure he knows what his answer would be if Ron did end up asking him, and saying that to Ron’s face would definitely hurt him.

Judy’s request is basically the perfect excuse. So he rustles up a small smile for her and hands her his hot chocolate.

“Sure thing, Judy Blume, lemme just get dressed and smooch Ronnie and then we’ll go together, okay?”

Judy predictably doesn’t bother looking up from her hot chocolate, shooting him a thumbs up instead as she gulps the treat down and probably scalds her tongue in the process.

He takes the tray upstairs and changes quickly and quietly so he doesn’t wake Ron who’s indulging in a post-orgasmic nap, and leaves a note instead.

He knows he’s running, knows he’s gonna have to face Ron eventually, and in fact probably sooner than he’s prepared for. But he doesn’t want to go back to him without an answer one way or the other.


	2. Life's not fair puddin'

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Michonne offers her sage advice.

Three days after his ill-fated encounter with the incriminating bit of notepaper and Carl is now outright avoiding Ron.

To the point where he’s actually gone out on a gathering run with Michonne, leaving at the crack of dawn without telling him where he's going.

That’s bad. He knows that’s very bad.

He also knows Ron’s not gonna let this one slide the way he hasn’t questioned the early morning yoga with Enid, the afternoon practice with Jude and Morgan and the evenings up in the guard tower playing poker and debating about the usefulness of night scopes with Sasha and Abraham only to crawl into bed for a three hour nap just as Ron is crawling out of it to do his shift at the greenhouses.

Carl gets restless, he gets nightmares that leave him unable to sleep some nights. Ron understands that. This is blatant avoidance, it’s highly personal and Ron will not understand it at all. Carl is going to be called upon to explain himself as soon as he gets back.

“You’re going to be sleeping on the couch tonight,” Michonne points out, echoing his thoughts without fanfare as she pulls the car a little ways onto the trail and throws it into park.

“It’s a comfy couch at least,” Carl tries, weakly.

“Not when you and your partner are fighting, trust me.”

Carl doesn’t even have a response for that. Michonne speaks nothing but the truth.

Sleeping in his own bed is a trial without Ron’s leg hooked over his waist. The guilt and the flutter of Ron’s lips on his cheek or forehead as he fakes sleep while he gets ready both burn through him like acid and at the same time the fear that clenches around his chest like a vise at the thought of telling Ron that he’d seen something he shouldn’t've, and that he loved him but wasn’t sure he could marry him is worse.

They collect the baskets, check their weapons and throw a few extra fronds of cedar over the car to make sure it can’t be seen from the road and are half-way down the first leg of the trail before Michonne breaks the silence again to ask.

“Are you gonna tell me what’s going on?”

Carl makes a noise that he knows is a childish whine, and then sighs, “Guess so.”

“So why don’t you start with why you’re avoiding your lover and we’ll circle around to see if I need to get my lover and dangle him off the edge of the wall by his ankles.”

“Oh god, could you not?” Carl groans, scrubbing at his face with one hand, “I can handle my own relationship troubles, I don’t need you guys threatening Ron for every other thing. Especially when it’s not his fault.”

“So it’s your fault then?”

Carl pulls a face, and then says: “Maybe, kind of. Not really, but…yeah, okay, maybe.”

“Very articulate,” says Michonne, dry as a desert, “Not at all vague and unhelpful.”

Carl sighs again, but drags a halting explanation about what he’d discovered the other day and how he’d discovered it out from under the aforementioned metaphorical vise around his chest.

“So the man you’re in love with wants to marry you and you’re not happy about it?” Michonne summarizes with a skeptical arch to her brow.

“I am, though, that’s the thing, I want him to want to be with me, and marriage is a big declaration. Y’know, like, I’m not gonna be satisfied until we’re as tied together as I can make us without actual handcuffs being involved. It’s nice to know for sure that he feels that for me.”

“So where’s the big insurmountable problem? You two are practically married already, all that’s left to do is find some rings and throw a party. Maybe dust off Gabe’s collar and put him up on a podium if you’re feeling formal.”

And Michonne is right, and this is nothing that the reasonable little voice in the back of his head, the one that also sounds like Michonne, hasn’t pointed out in his 73 hour rumination. But then there’s the unreasonable voice, the one that insists fearfully from the back corner of his mind where some of his darker memories live, that Ron doesn’t deserve to be trapped with ‘just another monster’, that he doesn’t even know what he’s getting himself into, really, because even if things haven’t exactly been smooth in Alexandria it’s nothing like it was before. And Carl hasn’t ever told him about some of the things that he’s done. Another smaller voice suggests that maybe Ron won’t love him anymore if he knows just how deep the darkness runs in him.

“Carl?”

“I haven’t told him things,” Carl says, his voice small and muffled in the quiet of the woods, “About Dale, or my mom, or the kid in the woods that day the governor attacked, or the Claimers.”

“Oh Carl—”

“You can say it won’t matter until your blue in the face, but I haven’t told him so I can’t know. Not for sure. I can’t marry him without telling him what he’s getting himself into. It’s not right. And after that, even if he isn’t—even if he still wants me, do I really deserve to be selfish and shackle him to someone like me?”

“You mean someone who will move mountains and walk through hellfire to protect him? Someone who will cherish him, make him laugh and just be there when he needs someone?” says Michonne, “Do you think that kind of love comes with terms and conditions attached?”

“It’s not—”

“You’re worried that he can’t love your most broken bits, but if I’ve learned anything from this stupid apocalypse it’s that when you love people, really love them. You forgive them the things they won’t forgive in themselves. You love them even when they’re talking crazy, you love them even though their hands are drenched in blood and their hearts are drenched in guilt, you hold on tight because they love you just as much and they make you happy and whether you deserve it or not is irrelevant,” she says, pausing to crouch next to a plant heavy with the ripe wild blueberries they’ve come for.

“You think life is fair?” she asks, after a moment.

“No,” Carl answers.

If he’d been under any such illusion when he was twelve it’d long since been stripped from him.

“Then why fight it when the natural imbalance on the scales of the universe tips the things you want your way? There’s no point. Not when the scales could just as easily tip the other way and take it from you in half a second. No reason to wait, no reason to hesitate. Because it doesn’t matter what you deserve or what he deserves. What matters is what you both want out of your lives and what you’re willing to do to make it happen.”

And that, that was a pretty good point.

Not something that Carl had considered before. That the universe could be unfair in his favour for once. It was a thought to mull on certainly.

“I will say though if you’re not ready to trust him with all your secrets, you probably shouldn’t marry him, and if you do trust him and he turns away from you afterwards me n’ your dad and probably Daryl and Judy will string him up by his ankles for real this time.”

Carl has to snort at that. They’ve been threatening that since he and Ron started dating but it’s not serious, Ron is as much theirs as he is Carl’s at this point.

And maybe that’s the point of this whole marriage thing. To make him more Carl’s than anyone else’s.

That’s the only appeal Carl can see in subscribing to the whole process. Well, that and Carol and Denise will probably get together to make a wedding cake and it’ll probably be the most delicious thing he ever tasted.

He turns the idea over and over, the mindless work of gathering the blueberries keeping his hands busy while his mind races.

“I want to marry him,” he admits after he breaks for water and to start in on filling a new basket.

“I know,” agrees Michonne.

“I’m gonna have to tell him everything.”

“You will.”

The prospect still fills him with a sick sort of dread but Carl thinks that maybe it’s lessened enough that he’ll be able to push past the automatic, ‘I can’t’ and do what needs to be done.

“He’s gonna be so pissed I came out here without him.”

“Yup.”

“I suck.”

“He probably likes that about you.”

“Oh, gross, please don’t!”

Michonne ruffles his hair, grinning, wide white and shameless in a way that Carl can’t really help but echo.

“Can I be the maid of honour?”

“Who says I’m the bride in this scenario?”

The tension bleeds out of him with the familiar back-and-forth with Michonne and the unseasonably warm autumn day, which is actually quite beautiful now that he’s actually paying attention, and the consumption of an unreasonable amount of blueberries certainly doesn’t help.

He has his answer, he’s made his decision. All that’s left to do is to follow through with it.


	3. Mon dieu, je regrette...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Ron and Carl have a conversation about the demons that haunt Carl and what that means for their future.

The house isn’t the place to do this thing. He loves his family, all of them, but he doesn’t want to have the added pressure of having them listening to every word that he says while this whole thing with Ron goes down.

It’s bad enough that they’re even gonna have this conversation without factoring in a peanut gallery. So he gets his sleeping bag from the back of Ron’s truck and lays it out by the pond under the willow tree where they’re out of sight and earshot of the town centre and sends Judy to tell Ron where he is.

The fact that Ron lets him stew until after the sun sets is telling.

So is the hunch of his shoulders when he stomps into view and tosses a sandwich into his lap, dropping down next to him on the blanket.

“Michonne said you didn’t eat lunch,” he says, yanking at the plastic wrap around his own sandwich with a quiet ferocity and not meeting Carl’s eyes.

“Thanks,” Carl says, not touching the sandwich.

It doesn’t take more than a minute for the impending explosion to go off.

“What the actual fuck Carl?” Ron snaps, abandoning the sandwich to face him, “I get if you need space or whatever, but this is fucking different. You went on a run. Without me. For no reason. And you didn’t even have the decency to tell me goodbye. Sneaking out after I’d already left for work like you—”

Ron cuts himself off with a huff, and his voice is thick with unshed tears when he speaks next, “Is it—did I do something? Is there—”

Carl can’t listen to Ron ask him if there’s someone else in that small helpless voice, so he tilts his head up so that their looking each other in the eyes and says, “Hey, no. It’s not that. Don’t even think it.”

“Right, because you’ve been so forthcoming, sneaking out of our bed and spending all your time who fucking knows where?”

The tears spill over then, and Carl draws Ron’s skinny frame closer, tucks him up against his side and kisses his hair in a silent apology as his chest aches, “I mean what the fuck Carl? Why would you even—”

Whatever Ron is going to say is cut off by the shuddering sob that wracks his frame.

“Damn it!” Ron swears, misery dripping from his voice as he wipes at his face with the sleeve of his hoodie, “I wasn’t gonna fucking cry.”

“It’s okay,” says Carl, and he’s a little surprised to find that it’s hard to talk around the emotion that’s lodged itself in his throat, and it comes out rough and thick.

He clears his throat as if that’ll make a difference. And tightens his grip on Ron’s waist as if getting him closer will let the pain bleed out of him and into Carl.

He’d expected the anger, the swearing. He hadn’t realized that Ron would be like this, and he should’ve. If he hadn’t been so wrapped up in his own insecurities maybe he would’ve seen this coming. As it is all he can do is hope that he can lance this wound quickly so it’ll heal without a scar.

“Well,” says Ron, his voice trembling only faintly, anger once again firmly thrown up in front, “You brought me out here to talk I’m guessing, so spill it. What’s going on with you?”

And Carl doesn’t really know where to start, not with the actual words at least, so he reaches into the pocket of the hoodie. Sure enough, the little ball of notepaper is still there where he’d shoved it and promptly thought of nothing else for the better part of the week.

“Oh,” Ron says when he uncurls it, soft and gut-punched, like he can’t breathe, “When did you…?”

“Just the other day. When I didn’t come back to bed. I saw it and I panicked, or something.”

“So you don’t want—” Ron starts in a tiny voice, curling into an even tighter ball.

“That was thing, I did, I do want—if you want it, I—” Carl cut himself off, he was getting off topic, “I wanted it. But I didn’t really think I deserved it. Still don’t, if I’m being honest. But Michonne knocked some sense into me, ‘cause I mean how often does anyone actually get what they deserve, right?”

“Carl—”

“Look, if we’re gonna think about this. If it’s something you think you want from me…there’s stuff I haven’t told you. Stuff you should probably know about me and the things I’ve done before you decide that I’m, I dunno, _it_.”

Ron chokes out something hysterical that might be the mutant cousin of a laugh.

“Babe,” he says, still snorting, “I don’t know if you realize this, I thought maybe it didn’t need to be said at this point, but hell, I’ve been wrong before. Carl, there are days when the only reason I fucking continue to exist is because you’re still breathing. You—you spent a really long time picking up the pieces after—after all that stuff with your dad, and then once you had them all you stayed and glued them into something resembling a person. I don’t care what else there is to your past. Honestly, I don’t think there’s a single thing you could tell me that would be bad enough to keep me from wanting you with me for the rest of forever.”

“But hell, you’ve been wrong before,” Carl points out, quietly.

“Only one way to find out, I guess,” says Ron. “Tell me. You’ve already decided to, right? You’d still be avoiding me otherwise ‘cause you can’t lie to any of us for shit. Let’s settle this.”

Ron arranges them so that Carl is pulled into the vee of his legs, and his long limbs have curled them both into a protective little ball, and he rests his head on Carl’s shoulder and he waits for him to speak with his face buried in his hair.

“I’ve killed people,” Carl starts.

“I know,” Ron points out.

“Most of them, it didn’t matter to me, which I know is pretty messed up, but—I did what I had to do, they died so I lived. It might not have been good but it was at least right,” he explains slowly, trying to keep the emotion out of it, just relay the facts.

“I’m guessing there’re a few that were wrong then,” says Ron.

Carl interlaces their fingers, and squeezes. Bracing himself to peer into the dark corners he’s taken to ignoring.

“The first one was Dale,” Carl says, “I met him on the night that they dropped the bombs on Atlanta, he looked out for us. Me, my mom, Andrea and Amy, Carol and Sophia. Even Glenn, just a little bit. I was acting out, going off on my own a lot, thinking that if I could learn how to kill walkers I could somehow help. They’d been teaching me to shoot with the others and, I don't know I did well, thought I was hot shit. So I went into the woods and I found a walker, but I got scared at the last second and couldn’t kill it. Watched it pull free of the swamp and still didn’t tell anyone it was there. It ripped Dale apart.”

“You were just a kid, you couldn’t have known.”

Carl shakes his head, he doesn’t want Ron’s absolution. He just wants him to know and maybe to still love him.

“I shot my mom,” he chokes out, “She couldn’t have her baby naturally so we needed to do a c-section, we'd known that for a while, Carol and Hershel had been practicing for weeks. But Judy just came at a bad time, there were walkers everywhere and Carol was missing, Hershel had just lost his leg. Maggie had to cut her open with a hunting knife and pull Judy out. And mom...she was bleeding bad, but we probably could’ve saved her, maybe, if we’d tried. We should’ve at least tried. But she…she didn’t want to live, she was tired and scared and she’d done what she’d set out to do and so I killed her. I made Maggie go and I shot her before she could turn. You should have heard the noise my dad made when she told him, it still wakes me up some nights.”

Carl takes a shaky breath and tries to concentrate on the next one, tries to ignore the trembling of Ron’s free hand or the tears that he can feel leaking into his hair. Just the facts, he reminds himself, just the facts and nothing else.

“The next one was the kid in the woods,” Carl says, “He was maybe sixteen, one of the Governor’s people. They were attacking the prison and me and Hershel and Beth and Judith had been sent away from the fighting, we were waiting in the woods as backup or just to see if they’d make it, I don’t even know. Anyway, he was running from the fighting, he had a shotgun in one hand but when he saw us he was going to put it down. I could see it in his eyes. I had all the time in the world to watch his eyes that time, but I decided to kill him anyway. Just in case or maybe because I was angry at my dad for sending me away and wanted to show him that I could fight too. That I wouldn’t hesitate. All I ended up showing him was a peek of just how messed up I was inside.”

“Don’t talk smack about my partner,” Ron says, clinging tight, “I’ll fucking fight you.”

As far as reassurances go it’s not a bad one, but Carl still curls in on himself a little because this is the thing that makes him feel like he’ll never be clean again. This is the thing he hates himself for, more than almost anything else.

“After the prison fell it was just me, my dad and Michonne on the road for a bit. We’d run into trouble a while back, while my dad was still pretty badly injured and he had to kill this guy. Well it turned out that this guy’s group, the Claimers, had nothing better to do with their time than to hunt us halfway across Georgia and make us suffer for it. When they caught up with us—” Carl shudders, breathing hard.

“It’s okay, you don’t have to—”

“When they caught up with us,” Carl forces out, ploughing through Ron’s offer of an out without looking back, “I woke up with this guy leering down at me and I couldn’t move, not even when he dragged me out of the car by my hair and put a knife to my throat. I was just frozen, too scared to remember that I had a gun let alone how to use it. The leader, Joe, put a gun to my dad’s temple and he said, he said they’d beat Daryl to death and then—then they’d have us. First Michonne, then me. And then they’d shoot him and that would be that.”

He keeps his eyes open because if he closes them he’ll just be back there, living it again, and that’s the last thing he wants to experience playing out in high-def memory right this second even if he can’t stop it from invading his dreams later.

“I still remember the rancid smell of him. Blood and BO and rotting teeth, I can still feel the fat weight of him pushing my face into the mud, and pressing all up against me. Can still hear him laughing at me, calling me ‘squirmy’ and panting in my ear like the fact that I was too small to do anything to stop him was the hottest fucking thing he’d ever seen. I watched what my dad did to him. By the end of it he was so covered in gore he was dripping in spots. He butchered him in front of me and it wasn’t enough for me. I still lulled myself to sleep every night by closing my eyes and imagining just how long I could make him suffer for making me feel that small. How I could draw it out, and make it hurt like nothing he’d ever experienced.”

“If you think I’m supposed to do anything but applaud you for your creativity, you’re fucking wrong, and you don’t know me at all,” Ron says, fairly vibrating with anger. “He tried to rape you, he deserves everything Rick did to him and everything you imagined for him, and then some.”

Carl shrugs, “It’s not like I don’t agree with you. But, I opened doors in my head those nights. Doors that you shouldn’t open. Doors that don’t close again. Sometimes it feels like he tainted me with it, the moment he touched me, but I know better. They’re my thoughts, they come from my head. My imagination. And I took comfort in them. Pleasure. What kind of person does that make me?”

“Uh, I don't know, maybe the human kind,” suggests Ron, who is taking this a lot better than Carl had predicted and a hundred times better than he’d feared. “If this whole end of the world mess has proved anything it’s that human being are cruel. Vindictive. Jealous. And they always have been and now they just don’t have any excuse to hide it. The difference between you and the scum, one of the reasons that I love you so damn much, is that you choose to try and be better. You give people their fair shot, you fix the guy who tries to kill you ‘cause you see something worth salvaging when no one else does. You’re a good person in my book, Carl Grimes. For whatever that’s worth.”

“A lot,” Carl answers quietly, kissing the back of the hand that’s entwined with his. "It's worth a hell of a lot."

“Fucking better be,” mutters Ron, responding with a soft kiss to the nape of his neck.

“Is that everything?” he asks after a long moment of just holding tightly to each other and listening to the wind rustling through the trees and the ambient noise of an Alexandrian night.

“All the important stuff,” Carl answers relaxing back into Ron’s bruising hold and feeling more drained than he’d anticipated.

Ron, for his part, doesn’t exactly relax but he lets go of some of the thrumming rage and starts rubbing circles into Carl’s wrist either to comfort Carl or to reassure himself that he’s still there in his arms Carl couldn’t say. But then again it doesn’t really matter, the facts have been laid out at Ron’s feet and Ron shows no inclination to loosen his grip, literally or metaphorically, let alone push Carl away.

If Carl needed proof that sometimes the unfairness of the universe tilts in his favour, this would be it. Ron has seen everything now, he has no secrets of his own left, and somehow Ron still wants him, just as much as he wanted him before or so it seems.

“I wanna get married,” Ron says into his nape.

“You sure?”

“I’m really fucking sure.”

“Then, I wanna marry you too.”

“Good, then I’m gonna ask you properly sometime soon, and in the meantime you’re gonna promise me something.”

“Anything you want.”

“You aren’t allowed to sneak out of our bed anymore for anything less than a make-a-noise-and-we-die situation. You wanna leave, you wake me up and you fucking kiss me goodbye so I can tell you I love you, or to be careful, or whatever shit pops into my sleep deprived brain. Okay? It’s not negotiable.”

“I think I can manage that.”

“Good. Cause we’ve gotta get up and go on that two week hospital run tomorrow, so you’re making breakfast and putting gas in the truck, and I’m sleeping in.”

Carl can’t help but laugh, craning his neck around so that they can kiss properly, “You’re such a romantic. I might just swoon.”

“Hey you’re the one who agreed to marry me.”

“You bet your ass, I did,” Carl purrs flopping back onto the cushion of the sleeping bag and dragging Ron down for a more thorough kissing.

They don’t end up getting much sleep that night, but Carl wakes Ron up in the morning by alternately kissing his face and jabbing him in the ribs with the pointy end of his finger. And the dopey grin and morning-breath kiss he gets for his trouble is well worth, well, anything and everything.

 

**Author's Note:**

> A three-shot amalgam of requests from my tumblr askbox, though I kinda cheated my first nonnie out of their fluffy proposal (oops). 
> 
> Hope y'all enjoyed and I'd love to hear what you thought.


End file.
